We’re taught from a young age that recycling is good, but not everyone is aware of the far-reaching benefits of recycling waste. Taking the time to recycle your plastic jugs, glass bottles, newspapers, cans, and other common items that make their way through your life can help conserve natural resources, protect nature, and reduce pollution. Improperly disposed items that end up in landfills instead of recycling centers do more than just take up valuable space–they have long lasting negative impacts for our planet, animals, and each other. Here’s a quick overview of what happens when you recycle common household waste the right way.
1. Preserve Natural Resources
In order to produce many items that can be recycled, raw materials must be extracted from the earth. This process causes pollution, can damage ecosystems, and depletes the amount of natural resources available. One of the main benefits of recycling waste properly is that it decreases the need to extract these raw materials, which helps preserve them and reduce the amount of pollution created to produce the items.
Recycling allows products to be processed and re-purposed for use again and again without needing to extract and process raw materials, which damages the natural landscape and habitats of creatures in those areas. You can do your part to help eliminate the need for raw materials by recycling plastic, glass, paper, and metal.
2. Protect Nature
Among many good reasons to recycle is the protection of nature. When items are sent to landfills instead of recycling centers they can leak toxins that pollute groundwater. These toxins can poison humans, animals, and plants, and destroy ecosystems as a result. Instead, when you recycle the right way you ensure electronics, plastics, and other items are handled by recycling centers for reuse.
Landfills also produce large amounts of greenhouse gases that negatively impact the environment. Recycling waste also decreases the need to create more new products, which promotes the ongoing conservation and protection of natural resources.
Extracting the raw materials needed for plastic or paper, for example, can throw precious ecosystems out of balance and destroy a wide range of life, from plants to animals. By properly recycling you can help protect nature.
3. Reduce Pollution
Mentioned above, recycling greatly impacts the amount of pollution that is produced by humans across the world.
When items are recycled it saves energy that would otherwise be wasted producing new, raw materials. This also means recycling reduces the amount of carbon used to process raw materials, because extraction processes often involve large machinery, land disruption, and extensive materials processing.
By recycling waste rather than putting it in the garbage for a landfill, it reduces harmful greenhouse gases that get produced by landfills.
Cutting down forests for paper production, polluting groundwater from leaking electronics, and disrupting precious ecosystems to extract materials from the earth can all be reduced and prevented by recycling waste. Simple acts of mindfulness and disposing of items you use on a regular basis help make sure you don’t contribute to excess pollution and damage to our environment. Now you know why recycling is good, and with Right Way Recycling we make it easy to get it done.